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American Business Needs Old-School Leaders

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By BILL LANE Special to the Tribune

The Tampa Tribune

Published: April 29, 2008

Where have the dinosaurs gone, now that U.S. businesses need them - or selective elements of their sometimes scary and scaly personae - so badly?

Take the now-extinct Jack Welch. His management techniques may have included spectacular displays of locker room language - interspersed with Irish charm and warmth - but by sheer triumph of his will he rocketed the somnolent GE stock to a 50 multiple and earned for the company the widely used sobriquet: "Greatest Company in the World."

And Lee Iacocca, who 25 years ago shouted at and hectored a surly union workforce. In the process, he performed successful CPR on a flat-lining Chrysler.

Or James Burke of Johnson and Johnson, who guided a meandering and fading company brilliantly to survival through the Tylenol murders. He didn't manage his company. He led it.

What do we have to learn from these men of the past? Leadership.

They all had rough scales, and spiked tails that whipped around doing collateral damage - but they were leaders. Gates and Buffett are brilliant-entrepreneurs and savants - but not the kind of people you would follow into battle. During my 20 years at GE, we would have killed for Welch.

At one of the final meetings of his top managers, I watched the faces around me as our CEO's demanding, pleading, passionate speech concluded; and those faces suggested a willingness to do anything for this aging raptor. Even though he was about to retire, he was still reaching through the chests of his top 500 managers and grabbing the hearts. "Promise me you'll do this. It's the future of our company. Promise me." Think he needed PowerPoint word charts?

Leadership. Don't see a lot of it any more. Mostly PowerPoint drones and wonks. As it is, we're in danger of moving into a "post-American era." An era in which T-rex Iacocca's Chrysler can hear the approaching rumbling of the "crash cart" rolling down the hospital corridor. Ford just slid to third beyond Toyota. GM, like the others, is being crushed. Where was the leadership at Bear Sterns?

We need a Dinococca to rally those companies - even as the wolfpack visibly assembles at the door. Welch used to tell me how much he envied "Lee," who could rally people (and get rid of them by the thousands) because the threat to the company's survival was palpable and imminent. Poor Jack had to rouse GE to superhuman performance with the best balance in global business; as if Paul Revere was forced to ride around yelling, "The British are not coming, but get out of bed with your pistols anyway."

Still, Jack did rouse them - and he saved his company from the IBM-ish fate that imperiled it. In the end, IBM itself survived - because the crusty and harsh leader Lou Gerstner came in from the bullpen to save it.

The business establishment of this country needs to get itself some real leaders - even if they do have some primordial-pit mud and dinosaur scales attached to them.

If more people don't step up, there's not a lot of time left before the "Post-American" ice-age settles in, and American businesses are run by a bunch of visionless spreadsheet weenies who will make Welch, Iacocca, Gerstner and Burke look like Renaissance men.

Bill Lane was Jack Welch's speechwriter for 20 years.

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